Poets served as the public relations professionals of the pre-modern world

Evidence

In pre-modern times, poetry was in many ways the most interesting and the most elusive of the means of propaganda. In the days before journalists and public relations officers, poets fulfilled these functions for tribes, chiefs and rulers. They had been engaged in these tasks for a long time. The Roman Emperor Augustus, for example, had his court poets in Rome doing public relations work for the empire in general and the emperor in particular. One might even argue that Virgil’s great epic, the Aeneid, is a public relations job for the Roman imperial idea. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 463

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the classic insight that literature has always been entangled with state power — resonates with similar claims about Aeneid as Augustan propaganda in standard classics scholarship.
• CANDY: The Aeneid as a PR campaign for the Roman Empire is a genuinely fun, tweetable reframe.